Behavioral Health EHRs: What is the Cloud?
We are asked on a daily basis which EHR a behavioral health provider should choose to run their organizations. Buzz words are thrown around like “cloud-based” and “web-access”. While it is true that the technology world is going the way of all things in the cloud, what exactly is the cloud?
When a software company tells you they are “in the cloud” what does that mean exactly? How do you know your data isn’t sitting on one or two dusty servers somewhere with your patient data being backed up to a less than secure source in someone’s office? Who has access to this patient data? How often are passwords changed and updated on these servers? Are these servers all in the same location or spread around the country?
With a stable and financially secure behavioral health EHR vendor it means your data is:
- Hosted on multiple servers in multiple states
- Backed up to secure sources
- Set up so that if your EHR goes down you are back up and running immediately with minimal to zero data loss (meaning your data lives and breathes on more than one server)